


Lizbob Supernatural Meta (season 5)

by lizbobjones



Series: Lizbob Supernatural Meta Collection [7]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Meta Essay, Non Fiction, archived from elizabethrobertajones blog
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-16 10:53:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16952658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/pseuds/lizbobjones
Summary: I have been writing a lot of meta on tumblr for a long-ass time.





	1. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that you like pie.

 

Just some quick thoughts on this, because I read my entire [Dean vs cake tag](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/tagged/dean-vs-cake/chrono) this morning while sobbing into my coffee, and I think this moment in 5x15 has always struck me the most when it comes to the thread of this imagery relating to Dean and the “apple pie life” that eventually links back to Mary and the deep sort of yearning represented occasionally by pie and what Dean has felt was lacking from his life all this time. (There’s an entirely other thread with the Dean and cake stuff which I’ve been lumping into the same tag that has nothing to do with this, but makes for very entertaining reading if you’re bummed out by the mothers and pies talk :P)

I’ve always been really emotionally compromised by Karen’s brief return to un-death and how her appearance was mostly filled with lots and lots of pie. Dean bonds with her later in the episode a little while eating more pie. Mostly she discusses being back from the dead, and how she has no intention to hurt Bobby; how she remembers the horrible things that happened to her and how she died but how she’s not there to weigh on him with the woes of the past, but is filling his house with pie to make the most of being back.

Of course it was a too-perfect scenario, zombie-ness aside, and Karen soon started to get sick like the other zombies and Bobby had to kill her yet again before she ate his brains, but for that moment there’s a tiny glimpse of a domestic life around the Singers’ house, and another tiny what if moment, giving Dean a moment with a mother figure to complement the father figure he found in Bobby, who also bakes pies. So many pies, all by hand, as a perfect housewife who’s up all night in the kitchen making so many delicious, perfect, homemade pies…

In contrast Mary is wonderfully real, especially the revelation that she’s  _never_  made a pie, and all Dean’s memories of any pie she gave him are all shop-bought pies… I do find it interesting though to contrast to this almost dream-like state where Karen was TOO perfect, possibly more than she ever was in life as well. It’s a stark contrast between her as a zombie and Mary back to life cleanly and apparently with no catch whatsoever. Except for the emotional baggage.

One of the most notable lines from Karen is this one:

> KAREN  
> I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say you’ve never been in love. He’s my husband. My job is to bring him peace… not pain.

Which I have seen used a lot in Destiel gifsets in times when Dean’s lied by omission to protect Cas’s feelings or such like. What I really love is that Mary is NOT sparing her boys’ feelings and is treating them with a different sort of love, that’s going to allow growth and change. She will confront Dean, demand to go on hunts, ask for answers, and she will tell him her meatloaf came from “the Piggly Wiggly” and apologise in a rather lighthearted way for bursting his bubble.

In a way that bubble is almost like a blister that needs to be lanced, full of all these idealised notions of motherhood that are represented with Karen – even though she and Bobby never had kids, Bobby adopting the Winchesters passes them right along to his wife when she’s briefly back, and Dean happily eats Karen’s pie, possibly one of the only times in canon he ever gets to EAT pie; the complications are present but she takes on a brief moment of motherhood to him, and she is representing everything he kind of wanted Mary to be, maybe just subconsciously, but the comfort that she offers despite being a zombie is an instantly identifiable feeling of having a mother figure, and in the show’s language that’s represented often by pie, so of course what does she do but makes lots and LOTS of pie.

So Mary offering up this pie that she bought and that’s as home-y and as much as she’s willing/able to mother them doesn’t live up to this dream, even while it offers something much better. I’ve already seen a lot of meta focussing on Dean’s heartbreak and laughing off Mary’s non-cooking before going to drown his woes, but I think it’s interesting to yank this mother figure and her perfect pies out of Dean’s memory and lay the moments side by side, just to show the sort of subconscious yearning he’s had for Mary with a nice visual demonstration. Obviously he’s being a bit emo about it now, but we’re 2 episodes in so he’s got plenty of time to accept the version of Mary who’s not the saint or the perfect housewife and mother, who isn’t going to bake him pie, but can still share in family moments like this and buy him pie when he needs it without having to conform to some ancient stereotype of how she should mother him…


	2. Dean's Jewellery

> **[fuckedupasusual](http://fuckedupasusual.tumblr.com/)**  asked:
> 
> In the light of the return of Sam's orange jacket - an spn fashion related question: when and WHY did Dean stop wearing his jewellery and accessoires? did he take a shower one morning and was like "Man, I gotta stop wearing these fake leather bracelets"? and what did he do with it?

* * *

Oh gosh I’m so tired I shouldn’t even try to answer this… tl;dr I spent a lot of time dazedly poking around Home of the Nutty collecting bad data and assuming a thing was gone as soon as it stopped showing up the first time.

Superwiki, by the way, is kind of useless for once… it says Dean only wore the bracelets in season 1 and 2 but he blatantly has a bracelet on when he’s resurrected in 4x01 and I remember that without checking.

Dean still wearing them from time to time in at least the first part of season 5 (i.e. I dropped in on 5x04 since I figured they’d be easy to spot in the opening scene). He has uncovered forearms in the open of 5x16 and no bracelet but I was completely un-thorough so I was just grabbing random episodes where I thought I’d probably see his forearms without much clicking, and despite having once written a fic about Dean having a huge elbow fetish which accidentally shaped my entire blog, I don’t have a clue where every example of exposed Winchester arms are :P But some time in that stretch of episodes.

Dean loses the ring between 5x07 and 5x08. On his hand in the last shot of one, not on his hand in the first shot of the next, or when we roll back time to the chronological start of Changing Channels. Concoct whatever elaborate theory you like about them having never left TV land, tbh.

But yeah… Dean gives away the amulet to Cas in 5x02 for plot reasons but also the meta reasons that it was starting to annoy Jensen when he wore it all the time and it got in the way and hit him in the face. By 5x16 he’s lost ALL his major jewellery except for his watch as far as I can tell without doing a proper study on when the bracelets disappeared except that it’s between 5x04 and 5x16. Maybe it is something that they included a little more quietly, that while the amulet is the big example of it, Dean slowly sheds his entire jewellery box over the season.

I think there’s a large element of the whole loss of his sense of identity that goes through that season - that he’s going to be possessed by Michael and stop being Dean any more, to the point that it’s a blatant suicide metaphor/not even metaphor and just directly treated like it in 5x17/18. In 5x18 Dean strips off the rest of his personality, and puts it in a box; his jacket, gun and car keys. 

I and many other sensitive Dean fans over the years have written quite a lot about this entirely depressing collection representing his entire identity and largely being John connected stuff (I’m too tired to delve my tag for this episode but there’s at least a couple of things there >.>), at least in the sense of the jacket he took from John, the car John gave him, and the job Dean inherited as the family business. It’s one of the times Dean packs in the family business, and he only sticks out the rest of the mytharc before going to stay with Lisa for a year. In 6x01 we see the jacket in a box with John’s journal, which he gets back out to help, and of course the jacket then disappeared IRL but with fortuitous timing that Dean gets to shed another part of his identity he made himself. I think it’s good positive stuff in season 6 that he has to start trying to forge ahead and make his own identity. 

I was talking for some reason or other about all the points where you write the story up to a certain point and then you pick it up and turn it around and start writing backwards from it. Dean being possessed by Michael was the “end” of the arc about John’s influence forcing him into his worst self that every previous season had dealt with at least with one episode which made some sort of direct awful comparison to how it had destroyed Dean. (Dean telling Sam in 1x11 he wishes he knew how to think for himself, Dean selling his soul in 2x22, the demon!Dean exchange in 3x10, Alastair telling Dean how John didn’t break in Hell in 4x16, and then this in 5x18, although of course there’s some other pretty awful stuff in all these seasons, I’m just picking the anvil moments that spring straight to mind) 

Anyway now I look at it and see that Dean’s jewellery disappears bit by bit through season 5 culminating in him throwing away the amulet pretty much just tells me now that it was Dean getting rid of some symbolic layer, and all for the worse in this season. In the end he takes the car and jacket to the confrontation in Stull, and then never wears the jacket again (and Baby has become too much his to argue and anyway 4x03 symbolically did sort of give her back to him in a fated way so she’s only loosely thrown in with the rest, because he did already reclaim her completely for himself). Then I think instead of building up to how this destroys Dean, he doesn’t say yes to Michael after all, and he gets an entire new lease on life where he’s freed from the pressure of the apocalypse and he enters the open waters of character development to no particular aim except personal betterment.

I think they could have played it like Dean starts wearing all the jewellery again after season 5, but I think a lot of it was a security blanket - the bracelets are lucky charms, and probably in that universe literal wards against evil, and the amulet turned out not to be lucky in the ‘i like it and wear it because i like it’ definition but actually connected to *god* and all that drama. It had to go because it was a symbol of Dean’s shattered faith in literally everything from Sam through to God (though, and I sort of hate to be That Person, not Cas because they actually bonded over this shared critical hit to their faith and I think 5x16/17 have the strongest forward momentum on the whole original Dean and Cas arc aside from 4x16). And obviously God for Dean also relates right back to John. 

And I think also Dean would have less reason to start wearing all his jewellery that formed part of his skin as a hunter over that year with Lisa because he had put aside that identity - if he kept the bits, they were maybe in the box with the jacket, and I would ASSUME that box is still in some random corner of Lisa’s attic or garage and she has no clue which one of her exes left it there… (ow) or Ben found it and started wearing the jacket because why not (OW). Anyway since things happened this way, it means he left behind a part of his identity but it was an old part of his identity which had ended up linked with the bad stuff, the toxic stuff about John, and I guess for the jewellery just being a protective thing, part of the top layer of Dean. He’s a bit more emotionally naked from Gamble era onwards because she shifted the focus in the way the emotional stuff got told, and that was a sensible idea to shift from plot to character as a main priority of the writing.

Anyway sorry for the super long reply, but thanks for making me notice that Dean has all his standard jewellery at the start of season 5 and then has none of it by 5x16 because that turns out to feel massively important and this is a Huge Thought and not something cracky like I thought I was originally angling at when I saw this question and thought oh I will answer this really quickly after a long day and oops it’s past midnight and this looks like a subject that should have taken some actual work :P 


	3. A Little Angel :)

> **Anonymous**  asked:
> 
> Hey, sorry can you explain the scene where Dean says that Cas is sleeping like an angel but Sam says that angels don't sleep? I don't know what season or episode it's from so is it okay to ask you to explain the context it please?

* * *

Hiya! :D

That’s from 5x22, when Cas is pretty much entirely human after being cut off from Heaven. He can’t fly any more, he’s sleeping and getting bug bites that itch and so on… So when he conks out in the back of the car, Dean looks over like “awww he’s sleeping like an angel how adorable” like people say about babies that fall asleep in the car, because he’s being sarcastic about how upsetting and weird it is to see Cas like that, and then Sam explains the joke to Dean like, he’s not meant to be sleeping, this is seriously worrying, we’ve lost our best card here. 

It’s kinda like a muted, miscommunication-y version of the “he’s not an it” argument from 11x18 where Dean’s got a completely other perspective on who and what Cas is and how he’s personally invested in it, just because he’s been closer to Cas and of course he knows what Cas is and understands how he “should” be and that’s not sleeping like a baby in the back of their car so Sam’s not telling him anything he doesn’t already know, he’s just bringing in a different perspective. 

Sam is being way more pragmatic about the situation while Dean’s hauling in personal baggage on it by expressing things in a Dean way about showing concern for someone where it doesn’t even sound like concern to ears that aren’t tuned into it. I don’t think Sam even twigs that Dean is concerned rather than gently mocking, because they’ve got such bigger things to worry about, that not having a fully fledged angel on their team for the big apocalypse showdown is way more alarming than the way Dean said it. 

Essentially, Dean’s concern is on Cas’s behalf, betraying his own concern FOR Cas, and Sam’s concern is about Cas but also well aware of how powerful he should be and how that’s just one more thing that’s going really really wrong for them right then. I think the “correct” response to Dean’s comment would have been “do you think he’s okay?” and then they can worry about Cas together. Sam’s thinking, are WE going to be okay?


End file.
